Deloitte University Press published an article recently entitled “approaching disruption” – charting a course for new growth and performance at the edge and beyond by John Seely Brown, John Hagel, Andrew de Maar and Maggie Wooll.
As the article points out, depending on the nature of your business and the palate of business leaders for change, anything disruptive has a tendency to be viewed negatively.
Disruptive approaches and technologies can be negatively viewed and make leadership and employees anxious and feel as though they are being squeezed into a corner to adopt something that they don’t really believe in.
Back in the mid 1990’s I had the distinct pleasure of working on a number of projects that had this very result for various business units. Those who were the beneficiaries or the ‘victims‘ of the disruptions fell into several camps. Some embraced the new ways of working and the new process and information transparency that the processes brought to the fore while others dug their heels in and tried to find any number of reasons to explain or argue why things would not work or succeed.
These individuals, who spanned the organizational hierarchy could find nothing but opportunities for criticism or denial of positive outcomes resulting from the changes implemented or proposed.
They might eventually come around but the journey wasn’t always pleasant and certainly not plain sailing for the implementers, integrators and those around them.
The embrace
Ideas and technologies in particular, that can be disruptive should instead be viewed as opportunities to identify and target new opportunities for business growth and competitive advantage.
From an operational standpoint they should be thought of as ways to lower cost, increase efficiency and service customers or business partners better. If they don’t or won’t, why bother adopting them?
By not embracing the concept of disruption, there is the very real risk that opportunities will be missed. We often think of this as old-fashioned or old-guard thinking, this desire to steer away from disruption. Consider that sometimes disruption is not as obvious even to those who consider themselves open minded and open to change.
There is a correlation between the early adoption of new technologies and better business outcomes – The Digital Dividend First-Mover Advantage
As I look to the roadmap of SAP, I consider how disruptive for example, S/4 HANA is, for the partner network. SAP offers S/4 HANA certification and some partners have attained it, it really is only relevant to those SAP customers considering evaluation of S/4. The numbers, at the time of writing, were still actually relatively few.
Dealing with next generation SAP ERP
On face value we know that SAP customers are notoriously slow to adopt any major change, so for them, this disruption is almost imperceptible. On the other hand, there are new customers and new employees coming to SAP and they are going straight to S/4 HANA or are challenging the status quo of legacy ERP and the old ECC and R/3 model.
The newcomers are doing this because they’re unencumbered by the legacy of living with some existing SAP ERP system and have fresh eyes on the subject – they see the innovation and change around them and want to understand why it cannot be embraced.
Looking to SAP’s transition plans for existing customers, it is interesting to see that, as usual, there are many options on offer. Not least of these, is the ability to implement an S/4 HANA system as a new financial accounting and reporting engine. By implementing this and then hooking legacy ERP up to the new system as feeder systems it is possible to take advantage of the continuous accounting model offer by Simple Finance or S/4 HANA Finance and yet really only be working on an edge opportunity as Deloitte describes it.
In fact, considering many of the cloud offerings of today, edge opportunities is where they’re excelling. Add-on solutions like Successfactors and Concur from the SAP stable have a relatively narrow focus but offer rich capabilities in terms of accessibility and user experience beyond the traditional moated and walled ERP system. This is why they’re successful.
It isn’t all front office sizzle
Disruption will continue, the question is will it matter for a particular business and in particular yours? Depending on where you view your business as needing to be in the future, will determine whether you need to do something about paying attention to the disruptions. If you choose to use these disruptive opportunities to institute change is entirely up to you.
I don’t view Microsoft Excel as particularly disruptive or new but many view it as a corporate vulnerability and play-toy technology. On the flip side, if Excel moves away from being thought of as being the system of record and is simply used as a conduit or funnel to feed your back end systems – why wouldn’t you embrace it? The same applies to Access, Google Spreadsheets and any number of other office automation tools.
It wasn’t that long ago that attaching an invoice to an email was still not considered entirely kosher – better to fax it or post it so that we can put a rubber stamp on it when we receive it. Email attachments were disruptive!
The disruptive part here is thinking about simple tools differently in relation to how you should and could use it. Excel is the wagon that helps the back-office support the front-office on the competitive battlefield. It’s used in various ways every day.
You can choose not to do anything about these tools and ignore how users want to use them together with ERP. Alternatively. while you continue to consider new ways for users to work with your core systems of record with say SAP Fiori or other next generation technologies you may consider opportunities around rethinking how you can connect users operationally with SAP ERP from Excel, even with S/4 HANA.
Custom development and SAP’s Legacy Systems Migration Workbench in particular have been effectively dismissed by SAP and consultants for S/4. They’re promoting newer tools even though they don’t cover all the ground. These alternatives are being billed as the best ways to work with the next generation of SAP’s ERP .
Although this new tools are being positioned as replacements checking in anew with the user community and verifying how they work and how they would like to work, might be something to consider.
You may find that simply asking the question, “how are you using Excel” is disruptive in itself !
Additional Reading
- A study – The Digital Dividend-First Mover Advantage published by HBR and sponsored by Verizon.
- Read more on the Deloitte patterns of disruption series here
